“But she’s your mom.” I have heard this phrase so often in my life. It’s drenched with the guilt that kept me sticking around for her abusive narcissistic behaviors.

For as long as I can remember, my mother has shown poor boundaries and a lack of support in my day-to-day life. Without getting into detail on the specifics of our relationship (or lack thereof) that led me to cut ties – again, I want to wave a little PSA flag to other people out there like me that reads, “You are not alone, and you can do hard things.”

One of the biggest things I’ve encountered in my life lately is dropping my ego. By that I mean not taking everything so personally. Most of us have a story we tell ourselves about who we are. For me I often tell myself “I’m not good enough.” Then when something happens that isn’t what I was hoping for, i.e. someone telling me I could do something better, I take it to heart. I go right to that place of “I’m not good enough” or “I’m a bad person.”

Most people say that they love summer— the extended days, more sunlight, better weather, a slower pace, the cookouts, vacations, the list goes on. But have you ever thought that maybe going to school for 12 years has just conditioned us to love summer because it was the only chance we got to slow down and do what we needed to for ourselves? It forced us into a much-needed break.

Grieving looks different for everyone and there is a wide array of reasons for grief. The stinging grief of a life cut short, grieving for a friend when she is told she may never be a mother, or seeing a life come to a natural close. In the past month, I have experienced all of these things.

Have you heard the saying “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” I never really understood how to achieve big goals and eat my elephant until this past year. Since my son was born in September of 2020, I have experienced many physical and mental challenges.

You're sitting down with your bestie for life having a girl's date over brunch and coffee. After some small talk, catching up on the past few months you haven’t been able to see one another, you tell her that recently you got let go from your position due to mass layoff. You break down when you spill the news because the lump in your throat got way too big to keep in. She runs around the table, gives you one of her infamous squeezy hugs and says “oh, honey, I’m so sorry. You can get another job!”

Every day I have to read We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. My husband introduced my son to this book a few months ago because he loved it when he was a child. I had never heard of it and, since I am not pro-hunting, I was turned off from the book title at first (spoiler: they don’t kill the bear). But the more I read it, the more profound I have found the message to be.

I am no food blogger, but I do enjoy food– and I do enjoy blogging. When the topic of cooking for mental health was suggested, I started reflecting on my own relationship with cooking. As tends to happen through writing, I thought my initial topic would be cooking and fun recipes (and it is! See below!), but I also discovered that cooking became a way for me to heal body image issues and nurture my relationship with my body.

Home is where your health begins. I’m a self-taught interior designer with a background in public health. I know intimately how your physical environment can impact your mental health. Since March 2020, we’ve become way more cognizant of our home space, but have we taken steps to make our home more supportive of our mental health journeys?

We are all affected by stress at one point or another. For thousands of years, stress has been our body’s way of identifying and responding to external threats. Stress can trigger survival mode responses as a way to keep us safe, especially during life or death situations.

Haircut, shower, massage, screaming in the woods alone — self-care looks different to everyone. In the early months of the year, people tend to set goals for themselves, which are typically big goals like saving X amount of money for X or getting that promotion at work. But I think too often in the hustle and bustle of the new year we forget to add smaller goals like self-care to our list. I love self-care.

Recently, I wrote a blog called Digging Deep for Confidence. Since then, I’ve been on a journey to educate myself on what confidence is truly made of. During my research, I read “The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance” by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. This book leans heavily into how there are gender related differences within confidence and discusses how that upbringing, brain structure, stereotypes, and double standards affect confidence.

I used to put so much worth on my thoughts, labeling them as good or bad. I’d feel this deep and overwhelming shame with the “bad” thoughts. Many hours spent journaling, wrapped up in my bad thoughts trying to determine why they were coming up and trying to replace them with thoughts that felt more comfortable. 

As humans, we all want to be loved and accepted by those we surround ourselves with and those we spend our time with. These special bonds can be found in friends, family members, and especially, our pets.

I don’t remember where I specifically heard about the “seven year itch.” It wasn’t mentioned in my short engagement, during my early marriage, or the years after. But somehow, as my husband and I have traversed through our seventh year of marriage, we found ourselves referring to it. Google tells me the term came from a Marilyn Monroe film in the 1950s, which is surprising since modern marriages look wholly different, generally speaking, now, than they did back then. I can imagine the reason why women would leave marriages now also looks entirely different than it did then, since women could not even have their own bank accounts until the 1960s.

We all want good days but how do we make good days?

Make a list, or actually two. One list should be of things you do every day. The day-in, day-out things that almost never change — chasing your kids, folding laundry, exercising (maybe). Then make a second list of things you love to do — for me it is creating, pretty much anything, exercising, and gardening. Now, how many things on those lists overlap?

Let’s face it, your healing and your mental health journey can be a rollercoaster. It truly takes a support system to pull yourself out of dark space when you are having a challenging moment or a rough day. Yesterday was one of those days for me, so I called a few friends for moral support, and I’d like to share with you a few key points from our conversation that were so lovingly shared with me.

What is confidence? Are we born with it or is it learned? I was reflecting on my own confidence recently and had this big realization that I have gone from confident as heck, to completely broken, back to confident, but without the heck part. And this got me diving even deeper— what is the first extremely confident moment I can remember?

I’m in therapy. My therapy journey started 9 years ago, after my mother died unexpectedly.  Therapy has helped me through countless struggles, the most prominent being my infertility journey.  After my twins were born in 2016, I stopped going to therapy and looking back, that was when I needed therapy the most. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was trying to be the mother I wanted to be, while ignoring the elephant in the room— my own childhood trauma. 

When I was in my early twenties, I moved back in with my mom and stepdad after going through a break-up. I immediately started hunting for a job and applied to a restaurant I heard was highly sought after and very hard to get into without knowing someone to open the door for you. Two days later, my mom and I were eating at a different restaurant, and I asked if they were hiring and, well, they hired me on the spot.